The January 26 2008 edition of the Los Angeles Times has an interesting article by Stephanie Simon titled "What chores would Jesus do?" It describes a small commune of evangelical Christians in Billings, Montana, and their efforts to live the Gospel more fully.

The group started out with two married couples, a single man, and a total of five children. They shared a two-bedroom house in a very average suburban neighborhood (the single guy slept in the basement). The community still exists after a year, though with some changes in personnel.

This group is part of the so-called New Monasticism, itself an outgrowth of the Emergent evangelical movement. Useful references to the New Monasticism can be found here and here.

For well over thirty years now I've been interested in alternative communities and monasticism, and manage to practice a form of the latter within the limits of my married, householding lifestyle. What are my reactions to this article?

For starters, the community has no rule of life. A rule sounds restrictive at first blush, but it sets out what members owe to the community in terms of commitments of money, labor, and time. It also specifies what the members can expect from the community. Christian monasticism has a 1700-year track record in large part because it has rules (preeminently the Rule of Benedict in the West) and adheres to them consistently. Rural America is littered with the ruins of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of communes that tanked because everyone was too busy getting enlightened to take out the garbage.

Aside from group Bible studies, there is apparently no formal public worship and no emphasis on other spiritual practices (I'd think that lectio divina would be a natural for evangelicals. But have these folks even heard of lectio divina?

On a more mundane but very practical level, these people don't have enough living space. They're on top of each other most of the time when they're not asleep, and this naturally leads to stress and conflict. There was a '60's commune in Colorado (called Red Rock, I think) where several dozen people (and their kids) lived in a big geodesic dome--with no interior partitions. They were trying to create a new society from scratch. I wonder how many of them have MBA' s by now. There's a very good reason Benedictine monasteries transitioned from open dormitories to individual cells during the middle ages.

These folks could learn a few lessons from the Old Monasticism without compromising either their evangelicalism or their status as laypeople. If you insist on reinventing the wheel, you must be prepared for a wobbly ride.

The January 13 2008 issue of New York Magazine has a substantial and well-researched article on Episcopal solitaries. "A Hermit of the Heart" by Paul O'Donnell profiles three New York Episcopalians who combine life in this quintessence of urban madness with a deep commitment to contemplative prayer. These folks have real jobs and live alongside "normal" people yet manage to spend several hours per day in meditation and other forms of prayer. They are under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and are answerable on some level to the bishop of New York, yet they are not part of a monastic community. Each is, in effect, "a contemplative order of one." Since we observed the feast of St Anthony of Egypt on January 17, this topic is especially relevant.

The article is available here. A tip of the hood to Episcope for turning me on to it.

Brendan Sweetman teaches philosophy at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He has recently published Religion: key concepts in philosophy (London and New York, Continuum, 2007). This is a very basic and useful introduction to the philosophy of religion, especially if, like me, you are somewhat philosophically challenged. The following excerpt deals with the notion of religion and secularism as worldviews. This is relevant to those of us in the mainline churches who are confronted with liberal Protestant theology, particularly the variety exemplified by the Jesus Seminar or Bishop Spong, which tends to uncritically accept the truth-claims of post-Enlightenment secularism and reinterprets the tradition to accommodate secularism. The following quote is found on pages 10-11.

It is very common in the United States, but less so in other countries, to use the term 'faith' to describe religious belief. But this term can be quite misleading. The word 'faith' has unfortunate connotations, especially today, and can be used to set up a somewhat artificial distinction between faith on the one hand and reason on the other. The term frequently carries with it the connotation that religious beliefs are outside reason, or that religious believers are not interested in the rationality of their views, or worst of all, that religious beliefs are not even reasonable. This is often how secularists use the term, but it is also sometimes used this way by religious believers themselves.

The most important sense of the term from the point of view of philosophy of religion is the cognitive or propositional sense which refers to holding a belief for which the evidence is less than 100 per cent certain or decisive. Religious beliefs involve propositions about God, about God's relationship to the world and human beings, and about morality, among many other propositions. The religious believer cannot prove these propositions to be true in the sense of giving a scientific proof, or presenting decisive evidence for them. But he can at least try to show that they are rational to believe. This is the most appropriate use of the term 'faith' in philosophy of religion and marks the best understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. A religious believer holds many things on faith, but he hopes that it is a rational faith (not an irrational faith), and the work of philosophy of religion is, among other things, an attempt to investigate the rationality of religious belief.

On this understanding of the term 'faith', it is the case that all worldviews--religious or secularist--involve faith in this cognitive sense. That is to say, all worldviews hold beliefs about the nature of reality, the nature of the human person and the nature of morality, to which the adherents of the worldview pledge their commitment, but which they cannot prove decisively. Although it may be possible to back up some of these beliefs with rational arguments and evidence, it is still necessary to commit to them, since any arguments we have will fall short of proof, because of the subject matter involved. The subject matter of worldviews, which involves the three subjects mentioned, does not admit of scientific proof. This is true for all worldviews, secularist ones as well as religious ones. So if one accepts various beliefs about the nature of reality, or the human person, or morality, this acceptance will involve a commitment to these beliefs: a movement of the will as well as of the intellect. So, in fact, a religious believer and a secularist are in the same boat in this respect, a point frequently overlooked. We are often inclined simply to accept it as true without giving much thought to the matter that it is only religious belief that involves faith, but not secularism. But now that secularism is a positive worldview in itself, and a major cultural player to boot, it is no longer appropriate to overlook the fact that it is a worldview with many controversial beliefs that are the subject of contentious debate, and that its adherents accept many of these beliefs at least partially on faith.

Contributors

Joe Rawls

I'm an Anglican layperson with a great fondness for contemplative prayer and coffeehouses. My spirituality is shaped by Benedictine monasticism, high-church Anglicanism, and the hesychast tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy. I've been married to my wife Nancy for 38 years.